Responses to COVID-19: The role of performance in the relationship between small hospitality enterprises’ resilience and sustainable tourism development

Highlights

• The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has heavily hit small tourism enterprises.

• Resilience directly and indirectly influence sustainable tourism development.

• Performance mediates relationship between resilience and sustainable development.

• Enterprise type significantly affect the results and the research model.

• Small restaurant owner-managers showed more resilience than their hotel counterpart.

Abstract

Tourism is one of the hardest-hit industries by the global pandemic of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). Small tourism enterprises have been heavily affected and have had difficulty in business recovery. This research is an early attempt to explore the direct impact of small hospitality enterprises’ resilience on sustainable tourism development as well as indirect impact through performance. A pre-tested questionnaire survey was self-administered to owner-managers of small hospitality enterprises in Greater Cairo, Egypt. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) using AMOS showed a positive, direct, and significant impact of resilience (planned and adaptive) on sustainable tourism development and indirect influence through performance. The results of the multi-group analysis showed that enterprise type has a significant effect on the results, where restaurant owner-managers expressed more resilience than their hotel counterparts. Several theoretical (for scholars) and practical implications for tourism policy-makers and owner-managers have been discussed and elaborated.